Cloud

Collectors of trading cards are always hunting for rare shiny variants – and now astronomers have found the exoplanet equivalent. The shiniest planet ever found, LTT9779 b, is an ultra-hot, cosmic disco ball thanks to clouds made of glass and titanium.

While antibiotic-resistant bacteria are on the rise, you might have thought that the potentially deadly bugs would be found mostly where people and other animals congregate. But researchers have now found them in a most remarkable place.

NASA's Curiosity rover has captured a rare perspective of shimmering clouds on Mars at an unexpected time and location, which will help scientists better understand the reasons behind their formation.

Video calls are handy, but you lose that sense of presence. To make remote meetups a bit more personal, Microsoft has unveiled Mesh, a “mixed reality” platform that lets people work and play together as virtual avatars overlaid on real-world spaces.

Home to constant turbulent weather and the Great Red Spot – a storm bigger than Earth – Jupiter is the storm capital of the solar system. Now NASA’s Juno mission has discovered two new quirks of these storms – shallow lightning and “mushball” hail.

Using polarized light, astronomers have detected signs of cloud bands in the atmosphere of a brown dwarf far beyond the solar system. It turns out that these gassy giants have a similar appearance to Jupiter, and the same kind of wild weather.

In a world first, researchers have conducted a cloud-brightening trial as a way of protecting fragile corals in Australia's Great Barrier Reef, to see whether reflecting some of the Sun’s energy away could help limit damage due to climate change.

This year, Dropbox doubled the available storage available to Plus subscribers from 1 TB to 2 TB, but with it came a US$2 hike to the monthly subscription, up to $11.99 per month. For many home users, 2 TB is way more than is needed.

Martian clouds could have an alien origin, according to a newly-published paper. The study suggests that mid-level clouds form above the Red Planet due to a phenomenon called "meteor smoke," which occurs when space debris is shredded upon entering the Martian atmosphere.

Most home robots aren’t particularly customizable. Now robotics startup Ohbot has unveiled its newest creation Picoh, a blank slate of a robot that can be programmed to do basically whatever you want it to do.

Aircraft have been known to mess with the clouds as they pass through or over them. A new study has found that planes could be boosting rainfall and snowfall by up to 10 times, and examined the microphysics behind it.

Hot on the heels of Google’s announcement last week of Project Stream, Microsoft has now revealed its own plans for a video game streaming service. Dubbed Project xCloud, the service would allow players to jump into an Xbox One game on basically any device – be it a TV, PC, or even a smartphone.